Descending Into Madness

Sam Carana argues that the most recent dire report from the IPCC is not dire enough.

http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/08/is-the-ipcc-creating-false-perceptions-again.html

“There is no carbon budget to divide between polluters, instead there is just a huge debt of CO₂ to be removed from the atmosphere and the oceans. Comprehensive and effective action must be taken to combat run-away warming.”

Tad Patzek today with an interesting essay looking at the relationship between mineral resources and oil. We see once again that the discipline of economics is best understood by those without an economics degree.

https://patzek-lifeitself.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-mulitple-fallacies-of-simon-ehrlich.html

Multiple Fallacies of the Simon-Ehrlich Wager

In summary, the blanket statements issued by economists and journalists are too simplistic and do not reflect the nuances of this complex wager. Dr. Paul Ehrlich has proven himself to be a deep thinking scientist, while Dr. Julian Simon remained a happy imbecile until his death. So much for the confrontation of science of the spherical physical world with the flat-earth, infinity-seeking economics.

WSJ reported this morning that despite good sales the major wind turbine companies are losing money because of high shipping and raw material costs. Nevertheless they think the future of wind remains bright, especially if subsidies are increased as expected.

What they did not discuss, despite their own report confirming it, is that wind energy depends on affordable fossil energy. Nor did they discuss how an energy source that requires taxes rather than paying taxes will ever succeed.

Denial is amazing.

Plan is to eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks.
Getting to Mars alive has a better chance of success.
But it will juice the stock.

I’m surprised that the economy has remained as stable as it has through 2 years of pandemic. Wolf Richter today paints a nice picture of the extreme measures that were taken to achieve this stability. The negative consequences are beginning.

I dedicate this song to our “leaders”.

Good one from TAE today…

https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2021/08/the-covid-coyote-conspiracy-theory/

As I mentioned early my town has a rat infestation problem and though some suggested rat traps the mayor (who owns a coyote pelt farm) decided to address this by introducing coyotes. This had some unforeseen consequences. The coyotes also ate peoples’ pets and chickens and were a danger to toddlers. The rats mutated to a strain that many coyotes wouldn’t eat (the so called Sigma Rats). Now there is a new problem: Coyotes kill other animals (like racoons) and the rats feed on the carcasses and their population explodes (this is known as Coyote Dependent Enhancement).

Many people with pets, chickens and toddlers distrust coyotes and fenced off their yards and started using rat traps. They claimed traps worked well but the mayor brought in an expert that claimed that traps don’t work as well as coyotes and that traps can be dangerous to the user so the city outlawed the sale of rat traps. The mayor’s expert also did a study that showed that 93% of the rats were now coming from fenced yards and that Sigma Rats were breeding and mutating there. In desperation some anti-coyotes started buying gopher traps and trying to use these to catch rats.

One woman injured her finger in a gopher trap. Her trip to the emergency room was front page news. People complained that news of their pets that were eaten were never covered by the paper. This was dismissed as an anti-coyote conspiracy theory. Pro-coyotes are saying those with fences don’t care about their neighbors, should be ostracized, lose their jobs and they are threatening to forcibly tear down all coyote proof fences in town. The mayor is consulting with the city lawyer to see if these things are legal.

Dat lady can play…

A lot of chaff with Martenson’s wheat this week…

How is saying godless atheists are the real threat and not mentioning the fact that our species is in severe overshoot and needs to reduce it’s population any better or wiser than promoting big pharma and the great reset?

Another port closure in China, due to a single case of Delta. Maybe.

https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/8/18/china-port-congestion-worsens-as-ships-divert-away-from-ningbo

The partial closure of the world’s third-busiest container port is worsening congestion at other major Chinese ports, as ships divert away from Ningbo amid uncertainty over how long virus control measures in the city will last.

In nearby Shanghai and in Hong Kong, congestion is once again increasing after dropping due to the reopening of Yantian port in Shenzhen, which shut in May for a separate outbreak. The number of container ships anchored off Xiamen on China’s southeast coast rose to 24 Tuesday from 6 at the start of the month, according to shipping data compiled by Bloomberg.

A recap on the insanity from Dr. Kory today.

https://insidesources.com/the-political-pill-for-covid/

Dr. Bossche challenges opponents to a public debate.

https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post/how-remaining-in-the-dark-and-turning-in-vicious-circles-inevitably-leads-to-erroneous-decisions

This is to say that it is the complete lack of understanding of why morbidity rates are now increasing in younger age groups that now prompts short-sighted experts and politicians, who typically have no long-term antennae, to advocate for mass vaccination of younger age groups and children. As they obviously lack any kind of insight into the evolutionary dynamics of a pandemic and how those are driven by the interplay between viral infectious pressure and host immune pressure in the population, they don’t understand that mass vaccination of the younger age groups is only throwing fuel to the devastating fire of a self-amplifying vicious circle. I challenge any expert, regardless of reputation or qualifications, to invalidate or oppose my arguments in a public debate on a mainstream broadcasting channel. If that debate doesn’t take place, it should be very straightforward for youngsters, parents, guardians, or even the children themselves, to draw their own conclusions and decide what is best for themselves or the children.

Damn. I was hoping an unvaccinated healthy natural immune system might perform better against the variants but that does not seem to be the case. Our vaccination policy is increasing the danger for everyone. Time to rethink our strategy.

https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post/c-19-pandemia-quo-vadis-homo-sapiens

Summary

The WHO’s mass vaccination program has been installed in response to a public health emergency of international concern. As of the early days of the mass vaccination campaigns, at least a few experts have been warning against the catastrophic impact such a program could have on global and individual health. Mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic is prone to promoting selection and adaptation of immune escape variants that are featured by increasing infectiousness and resistance to spike protein (S)-directed antibodies (Abs), thereby diminishing protection in vaccinees and threatening the unvaccinated. This already explains why the WHO’s mass vaccination program is not only unable to generate herd immunity (HI) but even leads to substantial erosion of the population’s immune protective capacity. As the ongoing universal mass vaccination program will soon promote dominant propagation of highly infectious, neutralization escape mutants (i.e., so-called ‘S Ab-resistant variants’), naturally acquired, or vaccinal neutralizing Abs, will, indeed, no longer offer any protection to immunized individuals whereas high infectious pressure will continue to suppress the innate immune defense system of the nonvaccinated. This is to say that every further increase in vaccine coverage rates will further contribute to forcing the virus into resistance to neutralizing, S-specific Abs. Increased viral infectivity, combined with evasion from antiviral immunity, will inevitably result in an additional toll taken on human health and human lives. Immediate action needs, therefore, to be taken in order to dramatically reduce viral infectivity rates and to prevent selected immune escape variants from rapidly spreading through the entire population, whether vaccinated or not. This first critical step can only be achieved by calling an immediate halt to the mass vaccination program and replacing it by widespread use of antiviral chemoprophylactics while dedicating massive public health resources to scaling early multidrug treatments of Covid-19 disease.

Conclusions

By enhancing viral infectiousness, both MASSIVE crowding and MASSIVE vaccination will only contribute to promoting dominant circulation of more infectious viral variants and hence, compromise the natural immune defense system in a relatively higher fraction of the young and healthy population (i.e., as compared to the fraction affected by previous natural pandemics). This will sooner or later lead to full viral resistance to virus-neutralizing Abs and a dramatic increase in morbidity and mortality rates. There is no way the Sars-CoV-2 pandemic could be controlled by the current, imperfect C-19 vaccines. Using imperfect vaccines to control a pandemic (of a highly mutable virus causing acute, self-limiting viral infection) will only increase the toll Nature will take on human health and lives in return for regranting a license to rebuild HI.

A pandemic can only be terminated for good if the population develops robust protective immunity against the virus. This naturally occurs through HI. HI becomes increasingly stronger as a combined result of natural disease-mediated immune selection (i.e., as far as its innate, multipathogen-specific component is concerned) and active immunization (i.e., as far as its adaptive, pathogen-specific component is concerned). The more robust the HI becomes, the more effectively and durably the population controls the virus, the less frequently outbreaks will occur, and the less impressive those will be.

No matter how many mistakes mankind makes, Nature will always take control of the pandemic and generate sufficient HI to bring it to an end. However, this will not come without a dire price to be paid for an immune intervention that was already wrong at the root. This is because Nature will first reset the population’s immune status to that of a Sars-CoV-2 naïve population, i.e., similar to what it was at the outset of this pandemic. The difference being, however, that the immunologically Sars-CoV-2 naïve population will now have to deal with viral variants that have a much higher level of infectiousness than the original Wuhan strain. This represents a formidable challenge to our innate immune system since it has not been conceived to deal with a high viral load (1, 2, 3). In the ‘post-resistance’ era, circulation of highly infectious variants, combined with underpowered population immunity, is likely to lead to outbreaks with higher morbidity and mortality rates in human settlements with a high population density (e.g., urban areas), whereas rural areas would be less frequently and less severely affected. Inversely, HI would build up much faster in urban areas, whereas people living in areas with low population density would be less likely to benefit from HI any time soon. In order for the latter to minimize the risk of repeated exposure, they would likely need to rely on infection-prevention measures for much longer. It could take several years before epidemiological disparities between rural and urban areas merge into a more homogenous distribution and Sars-CoV-2 becomes truly endemic.

Artificial (human) immune intervention in a Coronavirus (CoV) pandemic could rapidly and durably yield immune protection of vulnerable individuals if and only if sterilizing immunity is induced. This means that the immune response induced is targeted at eliminating virus-infected cells. Provided this can be achieved at an early stage of infection, viral transmission and immune escape can be prevented all together. Consequently, immune interventions that generate sterilizing immunity are not at risk of putting immune pressure on the virus and breeding more infectious viral variants, even if deployed during a pandemic of highly infectious variants and even if vaccine coverage would need to be extended to larger (vulnerable) parts of the population. The first wave of a pandemic typically hits the most vulnerable part of the population. As a result of the growing infectious pressure, a number of young and healthy individuals may see their innate immune Abs temporarily suppressed. During this short period of natural Ab suppression (ca 6-8 weeks; 15), these individuals become susceptible to Covid-19 disease. Those who recover from the disease will exchange their innate immune defense for durable acquired immunity. This is to say that the overall rate of active immunization during a pandemic is merely determined by the level of infectious viral pressure exerted by the previous wave, but does not reflect the level of active immunization that would be required to tame the pandemic in case a surge in infectious pressure could be avoided. As a sterilizing immune intervention could readily abrogate a growing wave of infectious cases, immunization of only the vulnerable part of the population would already suffice to effectively and durably control a pandemic of an acute self-limiting viral disease and, therefore, obviate the need for mass vaccination. In addition, sterilizing immunity would grant full-fledged and long-lived protection to vaccinees, even if asymptomatic reservoirs of the virus would still serve as a source of continuous viral transmission. Last, usage of universal immunologic sterilizers (UISs) could abrogate and wipe out any CoV pandemic, regardless of the level of infectiousness of the circulating lineage and without the need for eradicating (*17) the virus. None of the current C-19 vaccines induces sterilizing immunity. They must not be used during a pandemic for they will merely drive immune escape and erode both, innate immunity (i.e., by breeding more infectious variants that exert enhanced infectious pressure, and thereby render younger age groups more susceptible to the disease) and acquired immunity (i.e., by driving viral resistance to neutralizing Abs).

If we come to recognize that we are all part of one human race, one humanity, we, modern humans, should be able to exploit and coordinate our extraordinary and unique capabilities as ‘wise man’ (Homo sapiens) to turn the tide and rectify our mistakes. However, ‘wisdom’ can only prevail if we allow our intelligence capabilities (as measured by IQ) to synergize with our emotional capabilities (as measured by EQ). Over the last few months, we’ve increasingly been witnessing how profoundly this synergy has been disturbed. Let’s revamp our overall approach to this crisis and come up with a solution that can restore normality much faster, and reduce the case fatality rate much below the toll Mother Nature will claim if we leave it up to her to remedy. We can only turn the tide provided we work hand-in-hand to stop mass vaccination to begin with, and prevent high viral infection rates from inflicting further damage to the population. In the meantime we ought to upscale early treatment options and expedite the development of much more rational and pandemic-oriented immune interventions. The latter can be done if we learn how to educate our innate immune system to fine-tune its immunologic capacity and acquire immunologic memory in ways that enable more pathogen specificity and durability of the immune response, respectively.